Pig Island (Hardcover)

Vo Hayder's previous novel, The Devil of Nanking, was a dazzling, disturbing book that transcended the average thriller and confirmed her as one of that genre's most exciting talents. Now she delivers Pig Island, an equally astonishing, eerily fightening new work that broadens the scope of her dark vision. Journalist Joe Oakes makes a living exposing supernatural hoaxes. A born skeptic, from Bigfoot to the Loch Ness monster, he believes everything has a rational explanation. But when he visits a remote Scottish island, everything he thought he knew is overturned. Pig Island has been divided. On one side lives a secretive religious community where Oakes has been invited to stay; on the other, behind a high-voltage electric fence, toxin-filled oil drums, and a line of pigs' skulls, is where Malachi Dove, the community's founder and erstwhile leader, lives in total isolation. The warning is clear. But Oakes is on the trail of a strange creature caught briefly on film, a figure so deformed that it can hardly be human. Equipped with wire cutters and a camera, he goes beyond the skulls and into the valley where Dove lives and where the creature was last seen. The violent consequences of Oakes's transgression are so catastrophic that he is forced to question the nature of evil and to face a terrible reality: was he responsible for one of the bloodiest crimes Scotland has seen in years? And, worse, have his actions set into motion a killing machine that will stop at nothing? Pig Island is a riveting tale of fringe believers, dark secrets, and how skepticism can become its own sort of blind faith. It confirms Mo Hayder as one of the literary thriller's most talented, compelling writers.